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Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Swamp Things

Remember how I said I have a weakness for Shark movies? It's still true. Even if they're completely laughable.

What can I say about Shark Night (or Shark Night 3D if you spent the extra four bucks) that isn't going to hurt someone's feelings?

Well, the actors are...

The plot is...

The scenery is...

OK, there is nothing redeeming about this picture other than that the premise is so utterly hilarious that this movie has "drinking game" written all over it. I would not suggest actually PLAYING said drinking game because you'd all be dead of alcohol poisoning in the first 10 minutes, but it certainly has that potential.

I mean, it crosses horror movie genres and does so badly. If you're going to do a slasher flick, do a slasher flick. If you're going to do a shark movie, do a shark movie. If you're going to do a revenge film, do a revenge film. Never the three shall meet. And really, revenge and shark should never meet, either. We SAW what happened with Jaws 4.

Spoilers ahoy, kiddies.

So, the premise of the movie is that this girl and her friends decide to hang out at her summer house which is in the middle of a salt lake... somewhere... in the South, maybe. We're never quite sure. She stops to get gas and meets up with her old boyfriend who is hideously scarred, only not so hideously as to make him unattractive for some reason, and he and his hickbilly buddy are acting all creepy and Deliverance-y. No, we don't know why, yet. Then they get a boat to go out to the lake house and get involved in a high-speed chase with the sheriff who, apparently, used to do this all the time with the lead girl.

The kids make it to the lake house and bullshit with the sheriff for a few then start doing teenage horror movie things like drinking and changing into bikinis in slow motion and going wakeboarding. During the outing on the boat, the black guy (and it's always the black guy who goes first) gets attacked by a shark and loses his arm only it's not really lost because Our Hero, the pre-med student, goes in and gets the arm to put it on ice. Insert panicky teenagers here. So, yeah, while they're trying to bring him to the hospital (which is oh, so conveniently located about an hour away), black guy continues to bleed, attracting another shark that attacks the boat, which knocks a girl into the water (who promptly gets eaten) and making them crash into the boathouse. Black guy promptly gets pissed and ACTUALLY TAKES A SPEAR into the water to kill hisself a shark. He does, but it's the wrong one...

So, anyway, long story short, ex-boyfriend and hickbilly have imported sharks to the salt lake so they can make videos of shark attacks that they can sell to the Discovery Channel for Shark Week.

Wait. What? Oh, no. It gets EVEN BETTER!

Ex-boyfriend was WAITING for lead girl to come back so he could feed her to a shark because she's the one who accidentally scarred his face in a panic WHILE HE LEFT HER TO DROWN in a scuba diving incident. Yes, folks, he's out for revenge because the girl he left to die accidentally left him with a conversation piece that doesn't detract from his looks one iota. Not only that, but to do so, he imported multiple species of sharks, not all of which are adapted to live in murky water and including not one, but TWO, Great Whites, SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS PURPOSE. Money-making venture aside, this has all the earmarks of an Austin Powers world domination plot. All it needs is head-lasers.

This movie is what failure tastes like but in that sweet, sweet, schadenfreude-like way that makes me laugh all the way through it. Don't watch this if you want to be scared, because you won't. Watch it for the express purpose of mocking it and the filmmakers and the actors and all of their descendants for generations to come. Never let these people forget what laughable trash they made. And laughable it is. As a comedy, I give it an 8. As a horror movie? 4 tops.